Flight #116 Is Down (11 page)

“The fire,” said Heidi. “We have a dry hydrant, Mr. Farquhar. My father had it put in when we built the stables, in case we had a fire from the hay or something.”

Everybody with Mr. Farquhar spun around at the phrase. Breathless half smiles decorated their faces, as if getting Christmas presents. How often the comparison to Christmas had come to her in this horrid hour: the sparkling lights, the happy gasps.

They would need two thousand feet of five-inch hose. They would attach it to the never-used hydrant her father had installed at the pond, in case of emergency.

In case of emergency.

I guess this is the case, Dad, thought Heidi. And she looked at all the faceless people who had made her feel so rotten because of her courtyard and her stone walls. So there, she thought. We have a dry hydrant. So there.

Saturday: 6:40
P.M.

Daniel’s legs were buckled up in such a gruesome position he could not look at his own body. It hurt horrifyingly. Right after the crash he had not seemed to have pain. He had just hung there. Then the pain hit, and he screamed for quite a while, and now for quite a while he had stayed quiet. People kept saying to him, “We’re coming, son, we’re coming.”

It was amazing how many voices said he was their son.

A fat woman was sitting with him now. She had a funny little canteen thing with a long curving straw out of which Daniel could drink water. It took a lot of effort to sip from such a long straw. But the fat woman couldn’t get it closer to his mouth. “What’s your name, honey?” she said to him.

“Daniel.” He knew she was fat because he could see her folded feet. She was wearing a skirt and had very thick ankles and even thicker navy blue shoes. He didn’t know what she was sitting on. He couldn’t see her face, either. She couldn’t twist up inside his prison the way that first boy had.

“I have a grandson named Daniel, honey. I like that name. Are you traveling alone, Daniel?”

He shook his head, and great splinters of pain, like flying metal, pierced him. “My brother,” he said at last. “Tuck. He was on the plane, too. He’s only thirteen.”

“He’s fine,” said the woman. “He’s up in the house.”

Daniel wondered how she knew. He wondered if she was just saying that to comfort him. If it was a lie. “He was here with me,” said Daniel. His lips were very thick. Had he hit his face causing his mouth to swell up?

“You’re kind of wrapped in the plane, Daniel. But we’re going to cut you out real soon, honey.”

He noticed that she did not give him details on Tuck.

Daniel said to her, “Am I dying? Who are you? Will you tell my mom?”

She could not reach him very well. He felt her kiss on his lower arm. “I’m Mrs. Jemmison,” she said. “I’m a nursery-school teacher. I have a nursery school in my home, about three miles from here, Daniel. My husband and I are both ambulance volunteers, although we haven’t been active this year. We heard the call come over the scanner, and we got in the Buick and hauled over.”

He thought, If she kisses me, that means I’m dying. This is it. Oh, well, at least I don’t have to worry about being a paraplegic.

Daniel wanted to cry so much that oddly enough he had control over it and decided not to. Mrs. Jemmison would be the one who told his mom and dad how he died, and he was not going to have Mom and Dad think he whimpered. “How will they cut me out?” he said, thinking mechanical thoughts to keep away the death thoughts.

“They’ve got the Jaws of Life. Those are sort of hydraulic scissors that cut through anything, Danny boy. Even planes.”

His mother hated it when anybody shortened his name. She loved the name Daniel and detested the name Danny. But he didn’t correct Mrs. Jemmison. He wanted her to stay right here. Somehow he felt dying would be easier if he had company.

“You’re going to be the big excitement of the night, Daniel,” said a man’s voice from beyond Mrs. Jemmison.

“Tell them not to save me for last,” said Daniel, and he and Mrs. Jemmison laughed.

Saturday: 6:41
P.M.

“To cross that ravine,” said Patrick, “we need a makeshift bridge.”

“There are ladders in the garages,” suggested Heidi. “Maybe if we laid a ladder flat and put boards over the steps so we don’t fall through …”

They were already winding through the crowd in the courtyard to the garages. The buildings were locked. Automatic door openers clipped to the sunshields in the family cars opened these doors. Heidi herself rarely drove. For some reason, it had never appealed to her. Now she was mad at herself for that, too. Why hadn’t she known she would need her own set of keys? Her own way in? “Back in a second,” she said to Patrick.

Heidi ducked through a crowd of people offloading backboards from a visiting ambulance and ran into the large pantry between the kitchen and the back porch. From the wall she took Burke’s immensely full spare key ring. Each key, thank goodness, was neatly labeled. Otherwise they’d have been there half an hour, stabbing away at the garage keyhole.

In the garage were two good ladders. “The aluminum one,” said Patrick instantly, lifting it off its pegs. Heidi took one end, expecting him to take the other, but he said, “No, it’s light enough for you to carry yourself. Get it down there and get it in place. I’ll look for boards to lay across it.” He helped her angle it through the doors. “Is there a workshop?” he asked. “Woodworking?”

She shook her head. “Burke does that at his house, the gatehouse; it’s a half mile down the lane.”

He stared at the key chain, as if hoping it would suggest solutions.

Heidi said, “How about the barn? Take a door right off a horse stall. They’re on hinges; you could just lift one out.”

“Brilliant,” he said. “I love you, Heidi.”

She slithered down the hill. A woman she had never seen before, with white hair and fragile ankles, took one end of the ladder. “What are we doing?” said the woman. She was old. Blue veins stood out on her age-spotted hands.

“Making a bridge,” said Heidi.

The two of them worked easily together, Heidi in the ravine, ice water sloshing over her feet, until the ladder was in place. “Stabilize it with river rocks,” said the woman. The rocks were unbelievably heavy. Heidi felt as if she were shifting continents. But she got two rocks moved where she needed them, just as two men—neither of them Patrick—came down with a horse-stall door. It took two doors, actually, and by now there were so many people assisting that one took up a permanent position as ladder-bridge supervisor, calling out, “Put your weight dead center, don’t step on the edges, go slow, put your foot here, now you’ve got it.”

Heidi yearned to be the one supervising. But she didn’t know anything.

The elderly woman said to Heidi, “Your feet are soaked. Go into that big house up there and get your feet dry.” Heidi protested that she was fine, but the woman gave her a piercing look: the kind that really good teachers have:
Move it or die, kid.

So Heidi ran back to the house to get boots.

She was amazed to find she was not slipping.

There was no longer ice or even grass on the hill.

Four women were hauling a canvas sheet covered with wood chips and dumping it to make a very wide path up to the house and a second path to the archway that led to the courtyard. They dumped their load of mulch, turned around, and crossed the hill for more.

Heidi had no idea who they were. It gave her such a warm feeling that these hills, where she knew no neighbors, were in fact full of neighbors: of good people hurrying to help.

Back in the house, kicking off her icy sneakers, she rubbed her feet dry and ran up to her room for boots. She tugged socks on over her bare feet, swelling up now that they were warm, and jammed them into the boots just in time. Another minute and they would have been too swollen to cram in.

They’ll need more blankets downstairs, she thought.

She went down the hall toward Mrs. Camp’s wing, planning to raid the linen closet there because it was full of old blankets nobody used anymore.

Mistake; big mistake. The dogs leapt out on top of her, barking insanely. Winnie and Clemmie headed for the stairs, while Fang stood up on his hind paws and began licking her to death. Heidi shoved Fang back in, slammed the door, and raced through the house trying to gather up stupid, worthless Winnie and Clemmie.

She skidded past people carrying coffee trays and bandages and IVs. Her stupid, worthless semidogs cut between ankles and slipped yippily out of her grasp. I must look like a total jerk, thought Heidi. How humiliating. “Sorry,” she kept muttering. She was actually blushing. Hoping that at least Patrick would not see her.

Now she could smell bacon frying. I’m demented, she thought. Bacon?

In her kitchen, older people who could not toil outdoors were calmly running a canteen, making sandwiches and coffee, heating soup.

She found Clemmie there, yapping for bacon, picked the wretched hairball machine up, ran back upstairs, and threw Clemmie into Mrs. Camp’s room again, only to have Fang slip back out.

It did not help the atmosphere in the lower hall when a huge, galumphing dog raced joyfully toward wobbly survivors, and a girl at the top of the stairs shouted, “
Fang!
Down!”

Saturday: 6:55
P.M.

Patrick meant to join the firemen.

They had divided into two groups: those putting out the fire on the detached wing and those rescuing passengers stuck high in the rest of the plane.

Driving down the hill proved to be impossible, so instead, they detached the immense ladders from their trucks and carried them. They were now removing from the plane passengers who had not been thrown free and were too badly hurt to use the rubber slide. Most were badly injured, and each transfer to a backboard or stretcher was scary and hard. But it was nothing compared to lowering the stretchers back down the ladders to the ground.

Plus, everybody who remained conscious was afraid of the fire. The wind tossed sparks from the burned plane section, which crackled now and then, threatening like a volcano. Although a stream of water was now showering the wing, it wasn’t out yet. And there had to be more fuel in other tanks.

Everybody’s stomach was clenched with the desire to hurry, hurry, hurry, hurry—get out of here—get the victim out—get myself out, too.

A man who appeared to be completely unhurt kept walking back and forth screaming. There was something machinelike about his screams: he was rhythmic, as if supplying backup for a rock band.

He’s in shock, thought Patrick.

The man’s screams were unbearable, and yet Patrick did not want to waste time escorting an unhurt man to the house, calming him down, putting him indoors, getting his feet up to get the blood back to his head and heart. Not when there were people dying all around.

But the screaming went on and on until Patrick gave in, and, shuddering against the impact of the man’s screams, dragged him up to the house saying, “It’s okay, it’s okay,” which was probably the stupidest thing he had ever said in his life.

Saturday: 6:59
P.M.

Chainsaws screamed.

Carly thought the worst punishment of all was that shrieking metallic whirr buzzing through her mind, her teeth, her bones.

She was bleeding.

Strangely enough, there was no pain. Just fear; fear that came in surges, like aftershocks from earthquakes, rippling through her and bringing her to the edge of vomiting. Each time, she managed to stop herself. She knew that she was passing in and out of consciousness.

People were working all around her.

Sometimes somebody patted her shoulder or her hair or her hand.

“We’re coming,” voices kept saying, “we’re coming, you hang on.”

She wanted to answer them, but she had no voice. She was still inside herself, she knew that, but talk was something she no longer did. Still as Carly lay, she was spinning in circles.

I’m out of time, thought Carly. I’m seventeen and out of time.

The whirling effect spun her gently out of herself, and for a while her eyes closed; the scream of sirens and saws ended. A light as bright as bombs penetrated her skull.

She opened her eyes, thinking this might be heaven or hell. But it was still a plane crash. They had brought floodlights, and one was trained on her. She tried to tell them that it was blinding her; that she had no way to turn her head. She wanted to say, “Get my sunglasses, they’re in my bag.” She wanted to make a joke. “Hey, you guys, darken up there.”

But it was not the world that darkened.

It was Carly, growing slowly less attached, less aware, less alive.

Shirl, she thought, Shirl, I’m sorry. Don’t be mad.

“We’re coming, honey,” said a voice, or several voices. A chorus of echoes rang in her head.
We’re coming, honey, we’re coming, honey, I’m going home, Shirl, I’m coming, honey.

Her sense of what was going on grew thinner and thinner, narrower and narrower, dizzier and dizzier.

This is what it means, thought Carly, to hang onto life by a thread. I am not attached by jugular vein or pumping heart or spinal column. I am attached by a thread.

Saturday: 7:00
P.M.

This is so ridiculous, thought Heidi. I’m exhausting myself more fetching dogs than saving lives.

She finally cornered Winnie in the front hall, barking death wishes at a tall, slim, beautiful girl using the hall phone.

“A taxi,” the girl was saying with intense anger. “I want a taxi at this address. What do you mean, you can’t get here? This is where I am.”

A man in a fireman’s uniform tapped the girl on the shoulder. “We need the phone.”

The girl shrugged off his hand irritably, glaring at him.

“There are no taxis in this town,” Heidi explained, trying to catch Winnie. Winnie escaped between the beautiful girl’s beautiful legs. This was definitely a person on whom clothes hung perfectly. This was the kind of girl her roommates had expected for a roommate.

The girl looked Heidi up and down. Heidi had not felt so rejected since boarding school. How could this girl be neat under these circumstances? How could her hair be sparkly and her scarf at a jaunty angle? She had to be a passenger. She looked as if she had suffered no more trauma than a paper cut.